The CIO's New Tool: 'Journey Management'

I first encountered the term “journey management” in an eWEEK blog post that detailed 20th Century Fox CIO John Herbert’s use of the phrase describe his company’s technology development strategy.

We all benefit from simple tools that help us better manage our jobs, and to understand and enjoy our work, especially during difficult periods. Journey management is a useful descriptive tool because it enables a CIO to visually frame an IT project or initiative as a journey. Whether you are implementing a massive department-by-department BYOD rollout or expanding your organization’s cloud computing platform by several orders of magnitude, framing the IT endeavor as a journey makes it more cognitively understandable and, therefore, easier to accomplish.

At 20th Century Fox, Herbert’s current journey involves increasing the global scale of the company’s digital content delivery, reducing its data center footprint, and implementing a cloud computing infrastructure that includes private and public clouds. For the development of the cloud infrastructure, one of Herbert’s journey management tasks involves, as Eric Lundquist ’s blog post reports, “deciding which resources are best satisfied by using a public cloud architecture and which are best left in the private cloud” for Fox.

Herbert’s journey management of Fox’s evolving cloud infrastructure also involves some admirable strategic thinking. Thanks to Herbert’s business acumen and leadership, the IT department is educating itself about cloud services and learning how to use them to fix the company’s business problems, thereby turning IT into a broker of services, as opposed to a provider of services.

Today, the world of IT is in the midst of rapid and relentless technological changes—BYOD, cloud computing, big data, mobile devices and more--that appear to be unprecedented in the history of the IT industry. As a result, CIO’s job is increasingly complex and difficult. However, if you visualize each IT project and initiative as a journey, and one that can be managed, the endeavor will be easier to deal with. And sometimes it might even seem bearable.

About the Author

Jack Rosenberger is the managing editor of CIO Insight. You can follow him on Twitter via @CIOInsight.